US President Joe Biden signed into law what newspapers and activists described as “historic” on Tuesday, which expressly criminalizes the practice of lynching and designates it as a hate crime at the federal level, i.e. in all states of the country. It is a law of important symbolic value because it comes after a century of efforts by US civil rights organizations to get Congress to foresee a specific crime for a form of violence that has shaped the history of white racism against blacks in the village .
Specifically, the law establishes a new type of crime to be instituted against persons motivated by racial hatred, which occurs when there is a “conspiracy” to kill or seriously injure the person attacked. It was passed unanimously in the Senate and provides for a prison sentence of up to 30 years. It was called the “Emmett Till AntiLynch Act” and was named after Emmett Till, a 14yearold African American boy who was tortured and brutally killed by two white men in Mississippi in 1955.
In the late 1990s, civil rights organizations in the United States, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), described lynching as a form of “public violence by which whites sought to terrorize and control blacks. Nineteenth and early twentieth century decades, particularly in the southern United States. Usually, African Americans were abducted, tortured, and mutilated, but they were also often killed, beheaded, hung from trees, or burned just because they were black.
It is estimated that more than 4,400 African Americans were lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950, mostly with no repercussions for the whites who tortured and killed them.
After signing the bill into law Tuesday, Biden said that no federal legislation has explicitly penalized lynching, which he defined as a form of “pure terror” used “systematically” against “innocent men, women and children,” and ” reinforced the idea that not everyone was part of the United States and not everyone was created equal”.
The United States Congress began considering legislation criminalizing lynching in 1900, more than 120 years ago, but for decades discussions about passing federal law recognizing the acts of violence and atrocities committed against African Americans continued to be blocked or postponed. In more than a hundred years of effort, debate and civil rights struggles, it took more than 200 attempts to pass legislation recognizing lynching as a federal hate crime. In 2005, the United States Senate formally apologized for still not reaching an agreement.
Biden noted that racial hatred is not a problem of the past, but it persists today. Alluding to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has fought unjustified violence against African Americans in recent years, Biden recalled that “hate never goes away. He’s just hiding,” he said, hoping the new law could help fight racism in the country.
Also read: The latest investigation into Emmett Till’s murder